6/10/2010 @ 5:32PM

Tayyip Erdogan's Dangerous Rhetoric

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s speech upon his return to Turkey from meeting President Obama was greeted in some quarters with relief. “At least he didn’t declare war,” said one headline. Understandably, the confrontation between Israeli commandos and the Mavi Marmara has consumed the media here. And though it seemed, at first, that the national mood was one of shock followed by outrage, already numerous gently demurring voices have begun to break the surface. The prime minister’s speeches showed no such restraint: “Even bullies, pirates and criminals have a code of honor,” he said, “but for those who have none, it would be a compliment to call them such names.”

Condemning Israel for harming innocents, Erdogan added, “Even in a war, you don’t attack women, children and religious personnel,” (without, of course, elaborating on what to do if the latter happen to be combatants, as they often are in Islamist circles). The prime minister has traveled the country in a kind of victory tour inciting massed crowds to chant anti-Israeli slogans, repeatedly citing “Thou Shalt Not Kill” as being explicitly a commandment from the Torah and therefore all the greater a sin when committed by Israel. Some 22 national leaders are currently in Istanbul for a conference of Eurasian nations; Erdogan is publicly flogging the issue there, too.

The atmosphere in Turkey is highly combustible and open to political exploitation. Photos of bashed and bleeding young Israeli commandos published in the leading newspaper, Hurriyet–thereby confirming Israel’s self-defense argument–elicited cries of “traitor” and threats. Meanwhile, the Mavi Marmara events coincided with a string of guerrilla attacks in the country by the Kurdish terror group PKK. These included an unprecedented operation against off-duty navy personnel in the non-Kurdish port town of Iskenderun, which left six dead and seven wounded. In the anti-Israeli side of the docket one can include attempts by highly placed Turkish officials to link the two–that is to suggest Israeli support of the PKK–and ubiquitous voices asserting that no Israeli inquiry into the Mavi Marmara raid can be dependable.

Last Wednesday Turkey’s parliament passed a resolution to “reconsider economic and military relations” with Israel, and chat-show hosts continue to press the issue. Some hours previously, when Foreign Minister Davutoglu spoke at Istanbul’s airport upon returning from a two-hour long meeting with Hillary Clinton in the U.S., he used the phrase “crime against humanity.” He did, however, pointedly add that Turkey’s Jews were “our authentic citizens and Israeli tourists our guests,” an observation fully aired and applauded by the media. The leader of Turkey’s Jewish community has repeatedly come out against Israel over the Mavi Marmara matter.

Prime Minister Erdogan and his AK Party’s emotional stridency have not carried public opinion entirely. There’s a strong countercurrent of feeling that Turkey is gratuitously barging into the intractable quarrels of others. The spectacle of garnering intemperate support from Iranian leaders such as Ahmadinejad has had a sobering effect. A commentator on a leading Turkish all-news station observed that Turkey’s role had turned a corner from neutral go-between to parti pris protagonist. One national TV news website headlined its page with a startling quote from an Arab reaction, “Turkey is more Arab than the Arabs.” The new opposition leader Kenan Kilicdaroglu pointed out in a speech to Parliament that the ruling AK party was warned ahead of time by Israel, that the party sent the aid victims to their death and that it was nevertheless calculating enough to withdraw its members of Parliament from participating in the flotilla.

Moreover, as the PKK campaign continues daily to claim more lives–its operations have not abated since the Free Gaza flotilla debacle–citizens and local officials are being quoted as saying that the government should defend its own shores more effectively before incurring more enemies. The point is being made that the rate of casualties and deaths from Kurdish terror events has risen inexorably into hundreds per year during the AK Party rule since 2002 despite the party’s diplomatic embrace of Iran and Syria and other former enemies. All this is happening as Erdogan’s government arrests retired generals and highly experienced military officers qualified to fight the PKK.

For a measure of the near-madness of the mood right now one need look no further Davutoglu’s statement that “Arab blood is Turkish blood”; a number of commentators have riposted with a reminder that it was the Arabs who in the well-worn phrase stabbed Turkey in the back and sided with the British in WWI, thereby ending the Ottoman Empire. Many Arabs date their woes back to that moment–and Turks have hitherto felt that the Arabs reaped what they sowed. In a country at least as conscious of its Central Asian, Turkic, European, secularist and Kemalist identity as its pan-Islamic Ottoman past, there’s a palpable awareness of Prime Minister Erdogan’s facility for exploiting emotional wedge issues to drag the public toward his party’s so-called neo-Ottoman agenda.

To the extent that the “no problems with neighbors” policy of engagement with all neighboring nations has resulted in expanded trade and economic well-being, Erdogan has thus far overcome the public’s reservations. But the momentum has carried the country inexorably to the brink of war with an entirely new enemy, a former ally, with whom Turkey has major military and economic ties (in the day after the Flotilla incident, Israeli tour operators canceled some 30,000 tourist bookings this summer–the cancellations have risen to 100,000). Turkey is dependent on Israel for, among other things, the advanced optics of its F-16′s, which are constantly used to pound Kurdish terror bases in the mountains. (Israel too may soon mourn the closure of its most sensitive, most productive listening post that Turkey has allowed it to operate on the Iran border.)

The vast majority of Turks are angry with the Israeli government and don’t buy into its justifications, though even that seems to be less absolute as the days pass. There’s a distinct feeling that Turkey has only just managed to emerge from decades of semi-impoverishment, that the country cannot afford the undisciplined emotional showmanship of its prime minister or his incremental drift from West to Mideast–toward a horizon of strife and instability of the kind that Turks thought they had finally put behind them.

Everywhere, the papers quote Western sources banging on about how “Turkey has left the West.” Robert Pollock writing in the Wall Street Journal dusted off his rather oft-repeated thesis that Turkey brims with nutty anti-American conspiracy theories and has become irredeemably anti-American. This caused loud outcries in the media here, as it does every time Pollock airs it. Nowhere has he ever wondered why such “madness” descended on the Turks, and naturally without probing causes he can adduce no solutions. Nor has he noted that anti-American feeling reached its height during the Iraq war and has ebbed considerably since the advent of Obama (only to be replaced by anti-Israeli sentiment). Still, the argument gets repeated usually in tandem with the lazy iteration that America is everywhere rewarding its enemies and punishing its friends.

To this fraudulent and ahistorical point one wants to say that, for good or ill, no country has eternal “friends.” It has ideals, interests and allies whose interests fall in line with its own–for a time. Those change over the years. Britain was America’s No. 1 enemy for some 50 years in the early years of the Republic. Israel’s first friend was the Soviet Union.

Only weak countries derive comfort from the number of their friends. During the worst time of Mao Zedong’s rule in China, the hapless Chinese population was repeatedly assured on large billboards that “China Has Friends All Over The World.” This is now the kind of thing the Turkish public keeps being told, that suddenly Turkey has the world community behind it, that in Gaza and all over the Muslim world Turkish flags are flying, that there’s comfort in hearing the likes of Bashir Assad saying “these martyrs are our martyrs.”

It’s time before matters drift to irremediable extremes that all sides, at least at the top, cease to act and speak emotionally. Least said soonest mended, the proverb goes. Demonizing of this kind incites scurvy populist passions that soon grow uncontrollable. Erdogan may soon find that he has monopolized the global microphone at the cost of his country’s future, and that the region and the world will not forgive him for it.